


choose the door with p for past

by lokidreamsinbw



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: IW thor, Knowhere (Marvel), M/M, Time Travel, after the frost giants attack, and he's got feels for big strong thor, but smut with feels too, iw fix-it, loki's soft and young, smut in later chapters, the collector helps thor go back in time, they meet on jotunheim, thor 1 loki, thor's big and missing an eye
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 19:26:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14754845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokidreamsinbw/pseuds/lokidreamsinbw
Summary: Infinity War fix-it. With The Collector's help, Thor travels back in time to see Loki again. It's IW Thor meeting thor 1 Loki. Smutty in later chapters.





	choose the door with p for past

**Author's Note:**

> written as a prompt fill, asked for IW thor traveling back in time to meet thor 1 Loki.
> 
> Saw this gorgeous edit and fell in love with it and had to put it in the story : https://thorsradiance.tumblr.com/post/173899652400/hello-brother

It’s Thor’s first trip to Knowhere and he’s more than a little bit surprised to find The Collector’s museum still standing with The Collector himself inside it, alive and well.

It feels drafty in there. Really messy too—things broken and scattered and missing.

Thor ducks his head cause dangling light bulb and scrunches his nose—formaldehyde fumes coming from shattered tanks oozing slimy fluids.

The Collector is sitting on a shiny pile of Midgardian TVs, holding a rectangle-shaped container up to the light, squinting, lashes whipped-cream white. He’s got two small round objects inside the container and he’s about to add in the third.

And as Thor looks around at all those unfamiliar objects, piled up everywhere, his heart gives a quick jolt—it’s a sliver of hope cause Thor wants to see Loki again and there has to be something amongst all these artifacts that can make this happen. For the right price, of course. The Collector never refuses a good bargain.

Thor clears his throat.

The Collector acknowledges his presence by quirking a platinum-colored brow.

“Was expecting dust and ruins, to be honest,” Thor says, coming to a stop before this thingy that looks like an intergalactic calculator.

The Collector gives the container a little shake: sounds like beads solemnly smacking against glass.

“Well. Most tourists book a flight to Egypt without phoning in to make sure the pyramids are still there.”

He clicks his tongue and adds: “a big mistake if you ask me. Everything comes and goes. Even those things you believed would remain in one spot forever. Entire cities migrate from place to place with the moon’s guidance at night. You don’t have to see in order to believe.”

He holds up his free hand, fingers pressed together like a flower’s bud, “things disappear. Poof! Just like that.”

The Collector snaps his fingers.

The sound is dusty. It sounds like a crack in time and Thanos’s fingers come to mind and Thor gives his head a little shake because snapping Loki’s neck started it all and now everyone is gone and Thor keeps wondering why _he’s_ still there when others aren’t.

“Sore subject?”

Thor nods and The Collector nods back automatically, like a doll.

“Are you even real,” Thor says, more to himself than to the white-haired man.

The Collector lets the round object roll into the container and snaps it shut.

“Does it matter.”

The Collector could be a projection. A hologram. A walking memory an abandoned place retains.

A Knowhere butterfly flies towards Thor. It’s the size of a fruit bat and it’s got a skeleton and the skeleton is on the outside.

Thor bats it away with a _pffft!_ Cringing when the veiny wings flutter past his ear.

“It does,” Thor says, “because illusions can’t manipulate time.”

The Collector’s lips part with a _pop!_

and he spins in his seat so he can stare at Thor for a bit cause—

“Time travel?”

Thor’s gaze follows the departing butterfly. It slips lazily between the purple light bulbs of a shaky chandelier, making it rattle and shake when it lands on it.

“Yes,” Thor says, “I know it’s real. It’s not some fairytale. It’s been done before.”

The Collector looks at him like Thor is stupid.

Thor gives a one-shouldered shrug, “thought you might try and trick me into believing there’s no such thing.” He explains.

The Collector looks him over, making assumptions, drawing conclusions.

Outside the windows everything is black. The Collector’s museum is located inside a Space Giant’s empty eye socket after all, so not much light there.

“Used to being tricked?”

The Collector bringing up Loki stings.

“Used to hate it,” Thor says, “now I miss it.”

“We miss what we hate, we hate what we miss.”

Thor gives a blink, “no, it’s not like that.”

“We hate that we miss what we hate and we miss that we hate what we miss.”

Thor thinks about it for a bit, “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“We sense in our senses that sense is senseless.”

Thor pinches the bridge of his nose under The Collector’s enigmatic gaze, “okay, stop. This is not helping.”

“Help—”

The Collector starts but Thor holds up one hand cause he thinks he’s about to venture into another spiral of unending, confusing sentences and he’s on Knowhere, it’s already confusing enough there, no need to add more confusion to it.

The Collector blinks at him, amused, and ends the sentence with, “—is always appreciated.”

Gives Thor a look like _no mind games this time, see?_

The Collector squints one eye at Thor.

“Your brother visited often.”

As The Collector reaches for a remote control tucked away between the messy pile of the 60’s TV sets, Thor says: “Loki was here?”

The Collector hits the power button and every single screen comes to life even though none of them is connected to a power source.

Each screen shows Thor a different video of Loki, taken within the museum: browsing, sifting through stuff, sneaking a book about how to fly aircrafts into his pocket.

The Collector points to the _your brother is a little thief_ vid with the remote, “never got that book back, btw.”

Thor finds himself smiling big cause that’s just classic Loki right there and remembering Loki’s playful vivacious side makes him feel good cause for the past month all he could see in his mind’s eye was Loki’s glassy eyes staring at nothing, sprawled lifeless on the spaceship’s floor, a trail of blood drying by the side of his cupid’s bow.

The Collector leans forward and spreads his knees a bit so he can peer at the screen, his legs dangling in front of it.

“This is it,” he says, “ _this_ is the past.”

He gestures around with his hand, “all of these images they’re bits from the past. They’re moving. They’re colorful. But they’re like smoke after the fire dies down.”

He does a little walking man with his fingers, “you can walk through the past, you can feel everything coming back to you. But it will spit you out because you don’t belong there.”

And he stares at Thor, turning something over in his mind. He gets a twinkle in his eye Thor can’t read.

“You won’t be able to stay,” he adds and a sad hollow silence follows.

The sound of fluttering wings hitting metal—the butterfly trying to get comfy on the chandelier.

Thor closes his eyes for a second.

“I just want to see him.”

The Collector turns the TVs off. Slides off the pile to walk towards Thor.

“What are you willing to exchange for it.”

Thor drops his bag. Takes out two conjoined Earth Crawlers’ skulls.

The Collector gives an interested brow jump.

“Hm,” he says, taking the skulls from Thor for a more careful examination.

“Interesting you’d offer me this,” The Collector muses, peeking inside the empty monstrous eye sockets, “you offer me death for death. Fossilized skulls in exchange for something that has ended long ago.”

Thor bites his lips and they exchange glances because both know The Collector knows a thing or two about dying—he did die after all, once, and The Grandmaster gambled against Death to bring him back. He has been to the _Otherside_ , he knows just how final it can be, and to hear him talking about Loki like that, placing him amongst all these things that have passed from the realm of the present to that of the past, from the _is_ to the _never again_ , it makes Thor’s skin crawl. Because with Loki being gone, he knows it’s real, he just can’t accept it. Accepting it is becoming a collector himself, placing each memory he has of himself and Loki together in a sealed box and watching it become, with the inevitable passage of time, nothing more than an artifact.

The Collector tugs on the mandible of one of the Earth Crawlers. The mouth opens and he slips a finger inside to probe at a 1 cm long pointy tooth, really big for a skull the size of a tennis ball.

“From Odin’s vaults?”

Thor shakes his head, “Surtur’s. Asgard was destroyed.”

The Collector squints at him, “was it, though.”

Thor opens his mouth to say yes but The Collector snaps the Earth Crawler’s mouth shut with a smack of his knuckle under the chin and, stepping back and away from Thor says: “some things linger on.”

Thor follows him, thinking about what Odin said, that Asgard is not a place, it’s a people. But he feels that The Collector means something else entirely.

“So do you accept my offer?” Thor says, walking behind him.

The Collector’s black cape rocks against his ankles as he snakes his way through corridors and aisles.

The Collector grabs a set of keys off a metal hook and unlocks a shoebox-sized barred cage.

Thor watches, hands on his hips as The Collector bends over and places the two conjoined skulls inside the cage.

Looking from one empty eye socket to the other, The Collector then wags his finger at them, as if he’s telling them off like _behave!_

He turns the key in the lock and checks on them again, just to make sure.

Thor frowns at him because these are just some skulls, what harm can they do.

The Collector notices his frown, points to the Earth Crawlers with his thumb and snaps his teeth.

Alrighty.

The Collector puts the keys back and then shoulders past Thor, keeps going until he reaches a stack of shelves and then stands on his tiptoes to get to the one that’s the highest off the ground.

“Yes.”

A tiny _clink!_

“I accept.”

Bringing down a round plastic container from the shelf, he says: “on one condition.”

“What is it.”

Opening his eyes really wide, The Collector uses sound and both hands to mimic the sound of explosive thunder.

He shows the container to Thor, “you leave with me a little souvenir. An itty bitty lightning bolt.”

Thor’s gaze moves from the container to the twinkle in The Collector’s eye, “oh.”

“You see, Knowhere only has green lightning,” he scrunches up his nose, “who wants to see that.”

“And,” he adds, moving closer as if to whisper a secret on Thor’s ear, “I’m prone to occasional bouts of melancholia.”

Thor keeps his voice down, “are you.”

The Collector nods, birdlike, blinking up at him, “I miss the thunderstorms on Morph.”

“Earth.”

“Whatever.”

The Collector uncaps the container and offers it for Thor to take and make use of.

Thor gives a quick smile and a frown because melancholia, it doesn’t fit someone like The Collector. He’d ask him what’s the real reason he wants the lightning for, only it doesn’t matter to him now. He’ll give his heart to see Loki again.

Thor sticks his thumb into the container.

The Collector dropped a small twisted screw inside it so the electric charge will be drawn to it and not just bounce off the plastic.

Thor closes his eyes.

Focuses.

The Collector’s dusty whisper in his right ear out of the blue: “rain.”

In his left: “cold.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m handling this.”

“Hmph.”

Thor squeezes his eyes shut tight.

His ribs start rattling with the electric buzz.

The air around them crackles and snaps.

His fingers tingle.

A blinding spark shoots out of his thumb. It curls itself around the screw.

Thor is quick to place the lid back on with his hand and wrist still glowing white.

The Collector takes the container from him, worshipping it with his eyes, “ah. Superb.”

Thor shakes his hand. His fingers give one stinging tingle then all the white is gone.

The electric charge twists around the rusty metal like a sparkling tornado shooting off sparks and The Collector hides it in his robes, fast.

He motions for Thor with his finger to follow him.

They walk for what feels like forever, passing by tanks with monstrosities preserved inside them ; pedestals that carry inventions from long ago ; rooms that hold within them voices from the past. And when they pass by those rooms, Thor swears he can hear Loki saying his name.

_Thor._

Like a cold drop of water dripping down your back. Like a tendril of smoke coming from a sacred fire.

The Collector notices Thor’s sudden interest in the vacant rooms where, if he would step inside, he won’t find anything but walls and shadows.

“Follow me, Thunderer.”

Thor tears his gaze away from the rooms with great difficulty.

He follows The Collector and they reach a dead end.

There’s nothing there apart from two doors. The one on the left is marked with a P. The one on the right is marked with an F.

“It’s a shame, really,” The Collector says, “the _future_ one is broken.”

The door to the past is a mass of shadows that sparkle all holographic.

The one to the future is transparent and has a slight white sheen to it.

The Collector looks Thor over, “ _you_ don’t mind it, though. You do not care to know what the future holds for you. You deem it bleak for your brother is gone from your side.”

Thor watches the door to the past with eyes that continue to darken with sorrow.

“That’s true,” he says.

The Collector clicks his tongue.

“Pity,” he says.

He moves slowly to open the _past_ door for Thor.

A soft gust of wind washes over their faces. It brings with it the scent of wet earth.

There’s nothing on the other side, just darkness, like a night that is missing its stars, and for some reason stepping into it doesn’t scare Thor at all.

They stand in the doorway for a while. The museum breathes around them.

“When you fall,” The Collector says, “keep your eyes open. Search for his face amongst the others. You miss him and you keep falling through time—”

He lets out a quiet whistle, a freefall, “—for all eternity.”

Thor nods and takes a step forward, staring into the darkness until his head feels dizzy.

The Collector grabs his arm, stops him from taking the next step.

“You didn’t ask me how to come back.”

Thor gives him a sad smile.

“I don't want to come back,” he says and before The Collector can stop him, walks over the threshold.

Thor falls.

It’s this huge force that’s sucking him downwards and when his head falls back he sees the doorway and The Collector’s face in it, pale as a ghost, getting smaller and smaller until both, door and lover of lost and unique things, are gone.

And all around Thor—living figures. Smiles and talking, laughing, walking, running. Everything is in movement and they zoom by so fast leaving a ghostly trail behind and it makes Thor’s head swim.

It’s this vibrating noise and endless chatter, building and building up and it feels like Thor’s heart is beating in reverse.

Moments in modern history flash before his eyes all jumbled up, images from other worlds with landscapes so bizarre you can only stare at in awe, all their colors rushing around you like vagabond winds.

His ankles feel heavy and his chest feels light like it’s not even there at all and he’s just a floating head above a pair of flailing legs.

Trillions of faces and situations, words. And it feels like Thor’s mind is about to shut down on him, unable to deal.

But then, Jotunheim.

Jotunheim of _then_. Loki’s pale face amongst the battling figures, using his magic to fight off the attacking Frost Giants without knowing yet that he is one of them too.

“Loki!” Thor calls.

And Loki turns his head to look.

For a second nothing but darkness and silence.

Then, cold and black skies.

Thor falls freely from between the clouds, a giant bolt of lightning pulsating around him.

A snow blizzard. Towers made entirely of ice all around him, racing towards the night sky like spears.

Thor lands on the ground. Hard.

Loki at his back and an advancing army of Frost Giants attacking from the front.

“Stay back!” he hollers at Loki and, eyes glowing white he shocks the soldiers with a towering wave of sizzling lightning. It crashes into them, knocking them off their feet, swallowing them in a pool of blinding light, like a raging sea would devour a swaying traveler’s ship.

The ground is piled high with dead bodies and silence falls over all.

Breathing hard, Thor starts turning on his heels. Slowly. He’s afraid to look, fearing the only thing he’ll find when he’ll let his good eye wander will be a silent kingdom of ice, a trick and nothing more.

A quiet gasp when he sees Loki standing there, lightly fluttering dark-green cape, short hair, soft black leather gloves.

Thor’s lips part to whisper out his name but his throat closes up.

His left eye blinks softly and the tears stick to his lower lashes.

Loki looks up at him and his voice is small, confused.

“Thor?”


End file.
